Life Bitch Slap #7: Be the Plot Twist

Today was a day. A real day. You may have noticed I haven’t written in a while, as I’ve been busy jumping all in with my new team at Porch. In just under three months we’ve seen insane growth, solved really hard problems and made a pretty big promise to the world that I couldn’t be more excited to explore and execute on.

But things have also been a bit crazy. With any new job comes a new schedule and new challenges and adjustments and rhythms. None of it unsolvable but all of it is very real. New perspectives meet with others and hard conversations and big questions are asked. It’s both what is exciting and exhausting about taking this startup road.

One of our co-founders had this great quote the other day. He said, “Lots of people say it’s a marathon, not a sprint. But I don’t believe that. If it was a marathon, I’d be going a lot slower right now. It’s more like a series of sprints, and we are just at the beginning of one.” I loved that. It so perfectly sums up the last few months and what I hope to take on for the upcoming years — it’s like this series of sprints, all of them full of new challenges, each of them bigger and faster than the last.

So today was a one of those “real days” and at the end of it I found myself turning to an old friend…a video I’ve watched dozens of times at this point. It’s a video done by an agency out of Portland explaining their approach to beautiful marketing. You can watch it here. Every single time I watch it I get chills, because I believe it. I believe in that approach to authentic, beautiful, valuable storytelling. No matter how challenging or long a day is in marketing or startups for me, I can turn to that video and I’m reminded why I’m the luckiest lady in the world.

Tonight as I was watching it, I was bitchslapped by a sentence. It happens at 2:37 in the video where they state: “you’re like the plot twist.”

As marketers and storytellers, we are just that. We are the inciting incidents in the story of a company or a product or a brand. We take the storyline and we find the “ah-ha” moment and we find the medium to share it with the masses. We don’t create it, we help uncover it and then we find new and honest ways to help others stumble upon it. So it can shake up their day. So it can take their day from ordinary to extraordinary.

I couldn’t help but think today – what if I took that motto and applied it to life in general? The definition of plot twist is: “A common practice in narration used to keep the interest of an audience, usually surprising them with a revelation.” What if we all approached our days with these goals- to keep it interesting and serve the audience. To keep surprise and delight alive. To help others, through conversation and connection, to grow in revelation. That would some worthy goals.

I started the “Life Bitch Slap” series because they seemed rare…those moments when you are stopped in your track by a thought or a person or a moment (like how we should all be more thankful or that you knew what you were doing). Ironically, they have increased in tempo for me over the past couple of years. I feel shocked by life much more frequently than before. Snap let’s be honest…like all the time. Hell, I kind of enjoy these days. It’s a forcing function to stay humbled and true in many ways.

Today was definitely one of those humbling days, where you are reminded it really is a series of sprints in a long and exciting story. And we all have the opportunity to be the plot twist. We can choose to go along with the storyline as a passive character or we can be the inciting incident and participate in it fully. All in sort of living. Yes please.

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I believe in shaking it up, taking the riskier move, and empowering everyone around me to be their best selves. I believe in heads down, hands on, progress. I believe in doing epic shit, and I believe in surrounding yourself with people that are smarter than you. I also believe there is no better time to be wandering the web than right now. more